Suki raises $90M in Series E round to create AI agents

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Dive Brief:

• AI scribe company Suki has raised $90 million in Series E financing as it expands beyond clinical documentation, clinical decision-making support and revenue cycle operations.
• The company will use the funds to develop AI agents that can perform tasks like filling orders and scheduling follow-ups, Suki CEO Punit Soni said in an interview.
• The company will also use the new funding to scale its partnerships with health technology companies that have embedded Suki’s tools into their platforms, including Optum, Zoom and athenahealth.

Dive Insight:

Suki offers various AI-driven tools for healthcare, including ambient listening and transcribing to create clinical notes, automated order entry, billing code suggestions and patient summaries. The company recently launched Suki Ask, which provides AI-generated responses to clinical questions, analyzing information from patient charts and Wolters Kluwer's database of clinical research.

The company now plans to build AI agents to complete tasks after the patient visit and treatment plan are completed, such as referrals and prior authorizations for new medications, Soni said. These agents will use information from the company's existing tools to complete the tasks.

Suki will also use the new funds to deepen its partnerships with the more than 30 health technology companies that have embedded Suki's solutions into their platform. For instance, athenahealth's Ambient Notes is powered by Suki, as is the ambient documentation feature on the Zoom telehealth platform. With the funding, the company will work with its technology partners to embed additional capabilities from Suki, including the AI agents it plans to build.

“We want to go deep with them. We don't want to add 30 more [partners] necessarily; we want to actually go deeper…[and] deepening means taking those features we have built on the Suki app and giving all of them to our partners,” Soni said.

New investors Healthier Capital, Crosslink Capital and Hercules Capital joined existing investors in the Series E round.  

As the popularity of AI scribing tools explodes, Suki faces heavy competition in a market where raising hundreds of millions of dollars is not uncommon. Last year, Ambience Healthcare raised $243 million and Abridge secured $300 million, as the companies eyed expansion beyond clinical documentation.

In contrast, Suki has raised more than $250 million across its five funding rounds so far. Soni says that raising mega rounds of $100 million or more could create unreasonably high expectations of what the company needs to deliver.

“I think you should raise only how much you need,” he said. “You should use it only for the things that you can do. Having a little bit of starvation creates discipline.”